Tag: the war of terror

It Is Time To Abolish The Department Of Homeland Security

The Trump transition team on Wednesday announced that he is nominating South Dakota governor Kristi Noem as the next head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the coming weeks, we’ll hear a lot about Noem’s personal politics and origins. We’ll also hear about how the DHS is, as the AP puts it, “one of the biggest government agencies that will be integral to his vow to secure the border and carry out a massive deportation operation.”

Unfortunately, all this misses the most important point about the DHS which is that the DHS was invented in 2002 to justify more government spending, to reward political allies, and to influence local governments with federal grants.

For voters who supported Trump because they thought a Trump presidency might actually reduce government waste, they should now be asking why Trump is appointing any new DHS head at all. The only thing Trump should do with the DHS is abolish it.

For younger readers, or people with terrible memories, this might sound radical or extreme. But, I can assure you, dear reader, that the United States somehow managed to get along for more than 225 years before this department was created twenty-two years ago by Congress and the Bush Administration.

Much of what the Department does today was not new in 2002, of course. The federal government already had a border patrol, and it already collected tariffs on imports. The Coast Guard was alive and well. The Secret Service already existed, as did various agencies related to nuclear energy and the inspection of agricultural projects.

But, the DHS has always been more than just a reorganization of existing agencies. The DHS has overseen new slush funds for domestic police departments. It is the DHS that has largely facilitated the militarization of local police forces. As Wired put it in 2020, “the Homeland Security Grant Program has funneled billions of dollars to law enforcement agencies to acquire military-grade equipment.”

Nonetheless, the creation of the DHS has done nothing to make the border more secure, or to facilitate the enforcement of tariffs. The DHS has never been necessary to patrol US coastal waters. Rather, federal bureaucrats and elected officials pursued the creation of this new enormous government department for political reasons.

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FBI arrests Houston man for alleged ISIS ties, terror plot on US soil

A Texas man is in FBI custody on Thursday after authorities say he attempted to support ISIS and planned a terrorist attack on American soil – all from his apartment in Houston.

Authorities said 28-year-old Anas Said was searching for ways to commit violent acts on behalf of the Islamic State in the Houston area. He has been charged with attempting to provide material support to the terrorist group.

Said was arrested last week at the apartment complex where he lived, according to FBI Special Agent in Charge Douglas Williams. 

Williams said that while in custody, Said admitted to researching how to conduct an attack on local military recruiting centers, offering his home as sanctuary for ISIS operatives, bragging that he would commit a “9/11-style” attack if he had the resources and attempting to produce ISIS propaganda.

“We stopped a potential terrorist attack from happening right here in Houston! Any day we can publicly say that is a good day,” FBI Houston said. 

A detention hearing is scheduled for Thursday afternoon in federal court in Houston.

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Section 12 means British police are treating their own officers as terrorists now

A police officer has been arrested by counter-terrorism police in Gloucester over social media posts regarding Israel and Palestine. It’s no longer just journalists and social media users that police are targeting, it’s their own officers now.

The officer is suspected of “supporting Hamas” in breach of Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Police have explained they’re going through the officer’s devices for analysis and say we should not jump to conclusions.

This is fair enough, and given the details are sparse, I’m not going to discuss the ongoing investigation, or the officer’s potential guilt or innocence. I am, however, going to discuss how police have handled similar cases in which they appear to have overstepped the mark because there are concerns to be addressed. Those concerns involve whether the law is being followed in this and similar investigations.

Police recently visited the home of journalist Asa Winstanley and took his devices for analysis, even though he was not under arrest. It seems they wanted to look through his devices to find the excuse to arrest a journalist.

If police were correctly applying the law in this instance, this would tell us that our laws are authoritarian. If they were not correctly applying the law, this would tell us they are acting in an authoritarian manner. Either way, we would be witnessing a form of authoritarianism. It is therefore reasonable to ask in each case if police are correctly applying the law. We need clarity because we have the impression our rights are under attack. This is obviously unacceptable in a so-called free society.

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DOJ Arrests Afghan Refugee and ISIS Supporter for Conspiring to Conduct Election Day Attack – Arrived with Tens of Thousands of Unvetted Afghans During Joe Biden’s Botched Withdrawal from Afghanistan

The Merrick Garland Department of Justice arrested Afghan refugee Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi from Oklahoma City for conspiring to conduct an Election Day attack in November.

As reported earlier, Tawhedi planned the attack on behalf of ISIS.

According to the DOJ:

Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, conspired and attempted to provide material support to ISIS and obtained firearms and ammunition to conduct a violent attack on U.S. soil in the name of ISIS.

As part of the plot, the defendant allegedly took steps to liquidate his family’s assets, resettle members of his family overseas, acquire AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition, and commit a terrorist attack in the United States.

“As charged, the Justice Department foiled the defendant’s plot to acquire semi-automatic weapons and commit a violent attack in the name of ISIS on U.S. soil on Election Day,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.

“We will continue to combat the ongoing threat that ISIS and its supporters pose to America’s national security, and we will identify, investigate, and prosecute the individuals who seek to terrorize the American people.

The FBI set him up.

While liquidating their family’s assets prior to the attack, Tawhedi and his co-conspirator, who is a juvenile, advertised the sale of the family’s personal property on Facebook.

At the FBI’s direction, a confidential human source responded to inquire if a computer was still for sale. The FBI source noted that he needed the computer for a new gun business he was starting, which ultimately led Tawhedi and the juvenile to meet with the source and other FBI assets at a rural location to test firearms. Tawhedi expressed interest in purchasing two AK-47 assault rifles, magazines, and ammunition from the source.

According to the criminal complaint, on Oct. 7, Tawhedi and the juvenile met with the FBI assets at a rural location in the Western District of Oklahoma and purchased, received, and took possession of two AK-47 assault rifles, ten magazines, and 500 rounds of ammunition.

Upon receipt of the rifles and ammunition, Tawhedi and the juvenile were arrested.

Tawhedi entered the US on September 9, 2021, as one of Joe Biden’s unvetted refugees from Afghanistan.

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Guantanamo: Deal or No Deal?

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.”
~ Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

The case of the Gitmo plea agreement keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

A few weeks ago, we learned that a plea agreement had been entered into by way of a signed contract between the retired general in the Pentagon who is supervising all Gitmo prosecutions, the Gitmo defendants and defense counsel, and the military prosecutors. The agreement, as we understand it from sources who have seen it, provides that in return for a guilty plea, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others will serve life terms at Gitmo, rather than be exposed at trial to the death penalty. The guilty plea is to include a public and detailed recitation of guilt.

Stated differently, Mohammed agreed to reveal under oath the nature and extent of the conspiracy that resulted in the crimes of 9/11.

So far, this is straightforward. While the trial judge may have given his nod of approval to the terms of the agreement, under the federal rules of criminal procedure, the agreement is not final until the judge hears the defendants actually admit guilt under oath in a public courtroom and then accepts the plea in a written order.

That admission has not yet taken place because the Secretary of Defense, who learned of the plea agreement while traveling in Europe, removed the authority of the retired general supervising the prosecution to enter into plea agreements without his express approval.

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The FBI Entraps Another Fake Assassin

Two attempts on the life of a former president, less than two months apart, is unprecedented in American history. And yet it’s not entirely surprising given that the country’s most powerful institutions and industries have spent the last eight years weaponizing the most suggestible and mentally ill of our citizenry to target Donald Trump and his supporters. Now it seems the FBI may be recruiting from abroad as well. 

According to the Trump campaign, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently briefed the Republican candidate on “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States.” The Secret Service was alerted to the threat before the July 13 attempt on Trump’s life and reportedly increased his security because of it. But that was not enough to stop Thomas Matthew Crooks from shooting Trump in the face, killing Corey Comperatore, and wounding two other attendees.  

There’s little doubt the Iranians are targeting Trump, say former intelligence officials with whom I spoke. “The Iranians are promiscuous assassins, and they hate Trump more than anyone else on earth,” says Peter Theroux, a retired CIA officer who worked on Iran and related issues during his tenure at Langley. “Trump enforced sanctions against Iran. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He was the most antithetical to everything Tehran wants, including the triumphal visit to Riyadh he made for his first presidential trip in 2017.” 

But above all, there’s the fact Trump ordered the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, onetime chief of the Quds Force, the external operations unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and second in command only to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Iranians have vowed to avenge the terror master’s death and have threatened not only the former president but also former Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Iran envoy Brian Hook, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and his successor Robert O’Brien. In August 2022, the Justice Department charged an IRGC officer for plotting to kill Bolton. 

The Islamic Republic definitely has it out for Trump, but it seems this most recent Iranian plot to kill the Republican candidate was hatched by the FBI. 

Last month the DOJ announced it had charged a Pakistani national with ties to Iran in connection to a plot to assassinate a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil. According to reports, Trump was the target.

The suspect, Asif Merchant, entered the country in April and was arrested on July 12 as he prepared to leave the country. It appears that Merchant was the Iranian threat the Secret Service was briefed on before the July 13 rally in Butler, PA.

The FBI arranged his entry into the U.S. According to an August Twitter post from Fox correspondent Bill Melugin, Merchant “was admitted into the U.S. via parole for ‘significant public benefit’ when [Customs and Border Patrol] encountered him at the airport in [Texas] in April after he flew in from overseas.” The sponsor of his parole, Melugin reported, “was the FBI’s Dallas office, for ‘security interests.’”

Melugin’s sources told him the FBI had intelligence on Merchant “before he arrived in the U.S. and needed him to physically come into the country to develop the case on him and arrest him, and that if they had arrested him at Customs, they would not have been able to gather evidence and information about his plot.”

But to date there’s little evidence the FBI developed a case based on intelligence collected before Merchant’s entry. Rather, it seems more likely that federal law enforcement imported a terrorist entrapment target for the purpose of fabricating a plot. Former FBI agent turned whistleblower Steve Friend says the Bureau’s playbook is simple: “Identify a vulnerable person. Establish fake friendships with undercover agents and informants. Encourage him to agree to commit a terrorist act he is otherwise incapable of committing. Arrest him.”

Friend says that if the FBI really had probable cause for an arrest, it would make sense to facilitate Merchant’s travel rather than going through a lengthy and possibly contentious extradition process. But what’s curious, he says, “is that he was in the country for several months before they executed the arrest.”

If the FBI had intelligence on Merchant’s plan to kill Trump before he arrived in the United States, there’s no evidence of it in the affidavit for his arrest. “It was all information about his actions while in the United States,” says Friend. “That doesn’t mean that he hadn’t done anything before then. But it confirms that they didn’t have enough to arrest him when he arrived here.”

Neither the affidavit nor the indictment make a strong case that Merchant is an experienced operative. The “use of coded language, use of multiple cellular telephones, and removal of cellular telephones to attempt to avoid surveillance” cited in the affidavit do not, contrary to the arresting agent’s contention, exemplify expert “tradecraft and operational security measures.” “It’s laughable,” says Friend. “Like complex tradecraft is telling an accomplice to put his phone in a box? A corner drug dealer’s tradecraft is more sophisticated than that.”

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Will the Forever Wars Ever End?

September marked the 23rd anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. For the two decades since then, I’ve been writing, often for TomDispatch, about the ways the American response to 9/11, which quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, changed this country. As I’ve explored in several books, in the name of that war, we transformed our institutions, privileged secrecy over transparency and accountability, side-stepped and even violated longstanding laws and constitutional principles, and basically tossed aside many of the norms that had guided us as a nation for two centuries-plus, opening the way for a country now in Trumpian-style difficulty at home.

Even today, more than two decades later, the question remains: Will the war on terror ever end?

Certainly, one might be inclined to answer in the affirmative following the recent unexpected endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris by two leading members of the George W. Bush administration which, in response to those attacks, launched the GWOT. First, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who, after September 11th, sought to take the country down the path to what he called “the dark side” and was a chief instigator of the misguided and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq in 2003, endorsed Vice President Harris. Then, so did Alberto Gonzales who, while serving as White House counsel to George W. Bush and then as his attorney general, was intricately involved in crafting that administration’s grim torture policy. (You remember, of course, those “enhanced interrogation techniques.”) He was similarly involved in creating the overreaching surveillance policy designed and implemented during the first years of the war on terror.

Consider those surprising endorsements by former Bush war hawks a possible coda for the war on terror as a major factor in American politics. In fact, for almost a decade and a half now, there have been signs suggesting that the denouement of that war might be at hand (though it never quite was). Those markers included the May 2011 lethal raid on the hideout of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; President Barack Obama’s December 2011 authorization for the “final” withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (though a cadre of 2,500 military personnel are stationed there presently and another 900 are in neighboring Syria). In August 2021, 10 years after the killing of bin Laden, the U.S. did finally exit, however disastrously, from its lost war in Afghanistan. And in 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The counterterrorism measures have had an impact on the American threat environment. As reported in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, in 2022, “Only one attack in the United States was conducted by an individual inspired by a foreign terrorist organization” such as al-Qaeda or ISIS.

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Censorship and Transparency Issues in “Anti-Terror” Tech Alliance

Big Tech’s Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) alliance, often accused of censorship of legal content, continues to face allegations about an ongoing lack of transparency regarding its operations.

Founded two years ago by Meta, Microsoft, then Twitter, and YouTube (Google), it now has 25 members, and the stated goal is to flag and remove violent content from the internet.

The latest development regarding to controversial group – other than the ongoing transparency issues – is X deciding to leave the GIFCT board.

Two major problems have emerged around GIFCT’s activities and influence on the web: transparency, including around funding, and having a system in place that makes sure legal, non-violent content – such as that actually opposing terrorism, satire, media reports, etc – doesn’t get caught in the GIFTC net as well, resulting in censorship.

But, not one of the 25 members publicly shares how much content is removed (due to hash matches). Yet some idea of the size of the operation can be gleaned from YouTube’s contribution to the GIFCT database last year alone: 45,000 hashes.

There is also no information available about the number of appeals users lodge against content removal resulting from this process. It’s also unknown how many hashes are added by the companies themselves, and how many come from the government or researchers.

And apparently, GIFCT itself isn’t sure how many companies automate hash-sharing or flagging and removing content based on matches, and how many employ humans to do it.

The obscurity in which GIFCT labors is quite extraordinary, even by Big Tech standards: it is not known how many companies use the said database, and there is no independent auditing or internal review of the alliances’s work. In 2021, the BSR consultancy was hired to produce “a human rights impact assessment.”

47 changes were recommended, but the GIFCT board has not yet implemented any. And while at it – not even the founding four have always accepted suggestions coming from an independent advisory committee within GIFCT.

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UK Using Terrorism Law To Silence Journalists, Protestors Who Commit ‘Speech Crimes’

British police and prosecutors are relying on a recently adopted “speech crime” provision in terrorism legislation to target journalists, commentators, activists, and protesters.

The crackdown accelerated after Israel launched its genocidal campaign against Palestinians following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Among the most well-known examples of this crackdown is the case of British-Syrian journalist and commentator Richard Medhurst. 

Medhurst, the son of two United Nations peacekeepers, was arrested on August 15 by counter-terrorism police after his plane landed at London’s Heathrow airport. He was due to participate in a panel at the Better Days Festival in Devon.

“Something in my gut told me something was up,” Medhurst told The Dissenter, because there was an “unusually long gap” after the plane stopped and the doors opened. 

The pilot said that they were waiting for a plane to move out of their spot, but this turned out to be false. “One of the flight attendants said, ‘can Richard Medhurst please come to the front of the plane?’ I was literally in the front row.”

Officers, who were not in uniform, initially refused to answer any questions as to who they were and what they wanted and declined to identify themselves. Police demanded to know where Medhurst’s bags were and then took him and his property away. After he was taken to a small room, he was searched, placed in double-lock handcuffs in a painful manner, and transferred to a police station.

Medhurst, who is a member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) as well as the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), is well-known for his coverage of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition case as well as his reporting on geopolitics as it relates to West Asia.

This is the first known example of British authorities invoking section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000 to justify arresting and interrogating a journalist, which was passed in 2019 as part of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act.

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Israel seeks bill to allow police to probe ‘incitement to terrorism’ without approval

A new bill advancing through the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee would allow Israel Police to investigate suspected incitement to terrorism without needing approval from the State Attorney’s Office.

According to the Times of Israel, this proposal has raised alarms among civil rights groups and opposition MKs, who argue it could limit free speech.

Currently, such investigations require State Attorney approval to prevent overly broad interpretations of the law that could infringe on free expression. In July, State Attorney Amit Aisman revealed that police had initiated several investigations into incitement or speech-related offences without proper authorisation, bypassing his office’s directives.

Introduced by far-right MK Limor Son Har Melech, of the ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit Party, the new clause in the legislation is part of a broader bill that aims to tighten restrictions on incitement, extending the ban to include praise for individuals who commit terrorist acts, not just the acts themselves, reported the Times of Israel. 

If enacted, the law would enable police to act on formal complaints “or in any other manner.”

The bill passed its first reading in the Knesset in July, but Son Har Melech is now pushing for even stricter measures. A committee hearing on the bill, scheduled for today, was postponed due to scheduling conflicts with officials from the State Attorney’s Office and the National Security Ministry. The hearing is expected to be rescheduled soon.

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